Mid-Week Post

Your middle-of-May bundle of thoughts ...

Enjoy the decline:

If the economy had stayed where it was heading in 2015, Canadians would all be earning an extra $4,200 per year, according to an illuminating new report by Statistics Canada.

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This roughly means that if the Canadian economy had merely spent the last nine years sticking to its usual rate of growth, Canadians would have experienced a natural increase in their paycheques larger than any number of Trudeau government benefits, including the $500 one-time top-up to the Canada Housing Benefit offered in 2022, or the $650 per child currently offered to eligible families as part of the Canada Dental Benefit.

The Statistics Canada report — authored by researchers Carter McCormack and Weimin Wang — adds to a growing body of literature showing that Canadian productivity is dropping fast, resulting in noticeable decreases to income and living standards that are set to continue dropping for the foreseeable future.

Everyone from the Bank of Canada to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce to the OECD have now issued increasingly dire warnings about Canada’s “productivity problem.”

Earlier this year, the Bank of Canada’s senior deputy governor Carolyn Rogers warned that lagging productivity was now a national emergency. “You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘In emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” she said at a March speech in Halifax.

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With the Canadian government’s high debt-to-GDP ratios, such as a ratio of debt to nominal GDP sitting at 68 percent in March 2023, economists warn that government debt could become unsustainably high if Ottawa fails to reduce spending, increase productivity, and re-establish business confidence.

“We’re not growing our income per capita, which means that we’re not going to get the tax revenues that we need, plus we’re getting a lot of people retiring. So the situation could end up becoming quite unmanageable if we keep our pace that we’re going,” said Jack Mintz, president’s fellow at the University of Calgary’s School of Public Policy.

The federal government has run back-to-back budget deficits since the 2008 financial recession, with government spending spiking during the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, Canada’s debt as a percentage of nominal GDP rose from around 51 percent in 2009 to 74 percent by 2021, for example. Nominal refers to the current value for the particular year without taking inflation into account.

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Canadians’ confidence in their personal finances has hit a record low, newly released research suggests.

Confidence levels are now lower than they were during the 2008 financial crisis, according to a report from Nanos Research. More than 50 percent of Canadians surveyed by Nanos said their personal finances were worse off during the first week of May than they were last year, while 37 percent experienced no change in their financial fortunes.

“Only 10 percent of Canadians report their finances are better compared to a year ago—the lowest reported score on record,” Nanos Research chief data scientist Nik Nanos said in the report, noting that the score fell five percentage points from a month ago.

Canadians also had little faith in the economy with the majority saying it would worsen or stay the same.

Forty-five percent of Canadians surveyed said they believed the economy would weaken this year, while just shy of 33 percent thought it would remain the same. Only 14 percent of Canadians said the economy was likely to strengthen in 2024.

The Nanos Pocketbook Index, which tracks public perception of personal finances and job security, also dropped during the first week of May. Sitting at 50, it matched the low hit during the height of the pandemic in April 2020, when Canada’s gross domestic product fell by 10.7 per cent.

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It’s been almost a month since the Canadian federal budget was released and the long tail on budget articles and comments is normally not that long — perhaps a few days or a week at best.

But the furor over the capital gains inclusion rate increase from the current 50 per cent to two-thirds (with only individuals getting a $250,000 annual threshold at the current 50 per cent inclusion rate) is keeping the discussion alive and lively. The disingenuous and misleading messaging by the government that the proposal will only affect 0.13 per cent of individuals is also angering many.

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April saw the Trudeau government unveil its unbelievably ambitious (and some would say impossible) plan to build two million extra homes by the end of the decade.

The construction sector’s immediate response to this plan, apparently, was to shed several thousand workers. It wasn’t much, but between March and April of this year, Canada counted 11,000 fewer construction workers, a contraction of 0.7 per cent.

If 90,000 new jobs is a better-than-average performance for the Canadian economy, it relied an awful lot on public sector jobs to get there. April saw another 26,000 people get government jobs, against just 50,000 who got private sector jobs (the rest were new self-employed jobs).

In the last year, meanwhile, the public sector has gained 208,000 jobs against 190,000 new private sector jobs.  

(Sidebar: this public sector.)

Your corrupt, inept, wasteful government and you:

Former government whip Andrew Leslie, in his recent interview with National Post, is merely the latest senior Liberal to publicly pour scorn on Trudeau, his cabinet and the cabal of senior advisers around him.

(Sidebar: this Andrew Leslie.)

He can be added to the list that includes former ministers Bill Morneau, Jody Wilson-Raybould and Jane Philpott in recent books and memoirs. Other former ministers who have left government, such Catherine McKenna and Scott Brison, have hinted at their exasperation, while publicly keeping their own counsel.

Can they all be dismissed as disgruntled former employees, or is there merit to the criticisms that the prime minister and his entourage are unprincipled hyper-partisans who care more about spin than substance?

A common complaint is that Trudeau makes brazen commitments that he knows he can’t, or won’t, deliver upon.

The latest charge from Lt. Gen Leslie is that the prime minister and his cabinet are not serious about defence and have no intention of meeting spending targets because they believe the Americans will always defend Canada.

Leslie was involved in drawing up the Liberal defence policy document prior to the 2015 election. He says that this contributed to 2017’s “Strong, Secure, Engaged” policy that had specific timelines for equipment and an annex of 110 or so deliverables that were mostly missed. He said that since 2015, the Liberal government has not spent or has reprofiled, deferred or lapsed around $20 billion that was promised to defence, leaving the army “in a state of despair.”

(Sidebar: those aren't the only breaches of security Justin is guilty of.)

Wilson-Raybould was at the centre of the infamous SNC Lavalin scandal, in which Trudeau was found to have used means that violated the Conflict of Interest Act to exert influence on his attorney general. Wilson-Raybould later resigned from cabinet, was kicked out of the Liberal caucus, won her seat as an Independent and then left politics in 2021.

Trudeau said he was merely standing up for the jobs of his fellow Canadians.

In her book, Indian in the Cabinet, she said she thought Trudeau would make a good prime minister and create a good team but was proven wrong.

“There are lots of pretty words, but there are a lot of promises that have been made that have not been kept. And that leads, of course, to disillusionment and disappointment,” she said in an interview with Reuters in 2021.

In her book, she said she was angry that she had believed Trudeau “was an honest and good person, when in truth, he would so casually lie to the public and then think he could get away with it.”

Philpott has also written a book — Health for All — which is diplomatic about her exit from the Liberal party, after leaving in solidarity with Wilson-Raybould.

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But she also notes the demands by Trudeau’s staff to land partisan punches on the opposition. “I don’t think that things turned out the way they were initially described. The hyper-partisanship is so built-in, it just becomes insurmountable,” she wrote.

Morneau’s criticisms in his book, Where to From Here, are more explicit and damaging. The former finance minister said policy rationales were often tossed aside in favour of scoring political points.

He noted the recommendations of the Department of Finance were disregarded on the emergency wage subsidy during COVID, as Trudeau announced a much more generous program than the one Morneau thought had been agreed upon. “It was one of the worst moments of my political life,” Morneau wrote.

Challenges, he said, were not managed on a daily basis at the highest level and Trudeau’s management and interpersonal communication abilities were sorely lacking.

“The prime minister had an inability (for) or lack of interest in forging relationships with me, and as far as I could tell, with the rest of his cabinet,” he said.

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Wilson-Raybould said she was chosen because she was “an Indian in the cabinet” and Morneau agreed that ministers were picked for promotional reasons rather than for what they brought to the table. But that hardly mattered because power resided in the hands of a cabal of advisers around the prime minister who compelled agreement from cabinet ministers, he said.

(Sidebar: don't pass the buck now, Bill.) 

One example of the improvised nature of public policy-making, according to Morneau, was the “baffling” decision to commit to a public dental plan when the pledge to bring in pharmacare remained unfulfilled.

Now, all of these people are rats, and, unlike Jagmeet Singh (the scourge of lobbyists - save his own brother), are desperate to distance themselves from the Boy Blunder.

It is, however, emotionally gratifying to see his familiars publicly state what everyone else already knew.

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They'll still vote for her:

A picture is worth a thousand words as they say, and that’s certainly true of the photo below:

“This was the line-up for a food bank in Chrystia Freeland’s riding on Friday morning.”

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Idiocy or disillusionment?

YOU decide:

New Democrats petitioned the Prime Minister for a Royal Commission into “the rise in the deep distrust some Canadians have of our media,” Access To Information records show. Catherine McKenney, a Party organizer and then City Councillor, privately complained after the Freedom Convoy that some Canadians no longer believed the news: “What is the reason?”

Oh, must you ask?:

An RCMP review of the federal police response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy reveals that officers were uncomfortable with the unprecedented invocation of the Emergencies Act and felt immense pressure from government officials. 

(Sidebar: this RCMP.)

The report titled, “National After-Action Review into the RCMP’s response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy,” was made public last week. 

One of the key concerns raised by officers involved in the response was that they were uncomfortable in exercising the additional powers granted to police by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act.

“Respondents felt it was unclear what impact the invocation of the Emergencies Act had on the police response and police authorities. Furthermore, some respondents expressed they felt uncomfortable applying the peace officer authorities granted once the Emergencies Act was invoked as they did not feel that they had a clear understanding of those authorities,” wrote the RCMP. 

But you still followed orders.

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Access To Information records uncovered by Conservative MP Arnold Viersen (Peace River-Westlock, Alta.) show cabinet waited until after it invoked emergency powers against the Freedom Convoy to seek advice from Crown prosecutors. MPs for years have sought proof of cabinet’s claim it was told by lawyers beforehand that the action was lawful: “We will never know because Justin Trudeau censored it.”

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As the government of Justin Trudeau appeals January’s Federal Court decision that found his invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022 to be unlawful, history is repeating itself in uncanny ways. Newly obtained records from 1970 show that former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, like his son, also didn’t meet the legal threshold to invoke emergency legislation used to quell a national crisis.

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On Oct. 16, 1970, then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau announced that, at around 4 a.m. that morning, his cabinet had invoked the War Measures Act. A terrorist group possibly numbering in the thousands was about to overthrow the Quebec government. The only way to stop this feared insurrection was by suspending ancient civil liberties like the right against unlawful imprisonment, allowing police to make mass arrests of suspected members and hold them for weeks without seeing a judge.

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The situation was indeed serious. The separatist Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) that had terrorized Quebec with bombings in the 1960s had kidnapped Quebec’s labour and immigration minister, Pierre Laporte, and the British trade commissioner, James Cross. Laporte was later killed.

But not only was there never any apprehended insurrection (a legal requirement to invoke the War Measures Act), Pierre Trudeau was wilfully blind to whether one existed. This is apparent from formerly secret testimony by then-commissioner of the RCMP William Higgitt, which was obtained through an access to information request by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, as well as the findings of lawyer Jean-Francois Duchaîne in his 1980 investigation into the FLQ crisis for the Quebec government. ...

This rhymes with the stunning testimony of RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki to the Rouleau commission, which inquired into Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022.

Like Higgitt, Lucki attended meetings with the younger Trudeau in the days before the invocation of emergency powers, but was never asked for her opinion on whether these powers were needed. She later testified at the public inquiry that had she been asked, she would have said that police had “not yet exhausted all available tools.”

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Why didn’t the Trudeaus ask? Perhaps they had simply made up their minds to invoke emergency powers, instead of using the ordinary criminal law. They may have wanted to look like they had brought a serious situation under control, whether their methods were legal or not.

A second eerie similarity is that both governments suggested a shadowy network much bigger and more sophisticated than truly existed.

When the War Measures Act was invoked in 1970, federal minister Jean Marchand estimated that there were as many as 3,000 FLQ members. In his investigation afterward, Duchaîne put the number at closer to 35. Meanwhile, McDonald commission reported that of the 467 persons arrested during the October crisis, only five were prosecuted.

During the Freedom Convoy protests, then-public safety Minister Marco Mendicino repeatedly claimed a group of right-wing extremists planned to violently overthrow the government. Mendicino repeated these claims when he testified to the Rouleau commission, stating that a “sophisticated and organized” group of people were “preparing to become violent.”

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More than two years after the convoy, the government has offered scant evidence of a sophisticated and organized group intent on violence. The only potential serious violence associated with the movement was an alleged conspiracy to murder RCMP officers in Coutts, Alta. Two of the four men accused have pleaded guilty and been released from jail. The remaining two face serious charges, but the lack of similar cases suggests Mendicino may have exaggerated much like Marchand.

The eel is getting rid of the carbon tax; he is merely suggesting that it be renamed:

Former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney told a Senate committee on Wednesday that the federal carbon tax has “served a purpose up until now” and called on anyone who would want to scrap it to come up with a “credible and predictable” alternative.

Carney, who serves as the United Nations’ Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, was invited as a witness to study Bill S-243, which would require banks and other federal regulated entities to “mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.”

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But Conservative senators were hoping to grill him in the little time they had — the committee started late because of votes — on the federal government’s carbon pricing policy and overall spending, which led to some tense back-and-forths at times.

Leo Housakos asked Carney no less than three times if he supports “Justin Trudeau’s carbon tax” but the former governor gave a more direct answer to Yonah Martin.

“I think it has served a purpose up until now,” said Carney. “I think one can always look for better solutions and as a country, we should always be open to better solutions.”

But he insisted that any new climate policy should not only be better and more effective than the carbon tax, but also have the power to drive investment in a massive way.

“What’s critical in my view… is that if something is going to be changed, that something at least as good is put in its place. Ideally, if you’re going to change something, you put in place something better that still has that credibility and predictability,” he said.

“Because we’re in a position right now where we need $2 trillion of investments at the core of our economy in the next 25 years.”

No one is going to invest in a low-productivity, highly taxed country like Canada with few prospects and even fewer educated and trained prospective workforce members.

Any "green" project ends up being an expensive boondoggle, anyway.

Who, then, will Carney get to pay this new prohibitive tax?

First of all, these people were never Canadian.

Canada is a country of few immigration restrictions.

Canada was a stepping stone, just another house to occupy until something better came along.

This report would have more validity if the reporter had asked a native-born Canadian who paid into the system and was now forced to leave:

Nadia Bilal said her husband was making triple the salary as an information technology professional in Saudi Arabia, but he quit his job so their family could move to Canada.

Bilal, a 40-year-old robotics and coding teacher who lives in Mississauga, Ont., said her family landed in Canada in August 2017. Their savings was enough to help them survive as her husband looked for a job, which he found within five months.

Originally from Pakistan, she said she sought the dream of a better life and future for herself and her family, and that they found it during the first few years they were in Canada. Though Canada is inclusive and respectful towards religion, something the family sought out, she said now she isn't so sure it's the place they could realize their dreams.

(Sidebar: HA HA HA HA HA HA! There is SO much to unpack here!)

Bilal said her husband is "pretty happy" with his still-high-paying job in IT, and added all of her family members have become Canadian citizens.

But she's now trying to convince him that they should move out of Canada.

(Sidebar: are you going to renounce your citizenship?)

"I feel disappointed," Bilal said in a video interview with CTVNews.ca. "I was pretty happy living in this country. … I would have grown old right in this country. But now I'm reconsidering that."

Initially, she said, she expected Canada to have a safe environment and a good health-care system.

(Sidebar: HA! HA! HA! HA!)

"Like when you get taxed so highly, you expect these things to be given, right? But after the pandemic, … there is a downward trend."

With three children aged 15, 13 and just 22 months, she felt less safe going out as she noticed what she described as a rise in crime, road rage and general law breaking.

(Sidebar: oh, you DON'T say!)

She begged her husband to leave a very well-paying job for a pack of fictions.

What a maroon!

Also:

Immigrants to P.E.I. with soon-to-expire work permits are continuing to protest in downtown Charlottetown. 

Island workers with expiring permits in the retail and food service sectors will likely not have their documents renewed, due to recent changes to the province's immigration streams and Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) that will prioritize construction, health-care and child-care workers.

"We want them to grandfather us in and we want them to listen [to] what is right," says Rupinder Pal Singh, an internet technology sales representative who's lived in Charlottetown for one and a half years. His work permit is set to expire in two months.

"They want P.E.I. to grow... we want to be a part of it," he said.

No, you want to sponge.

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The Department of Immigration is phasing out costly hotel subsidies to shelter illegal immigrants and refugees. It will be up to local authorities to find “permanent, sustainable” housing for foreigners by 2026, it said: “Funding in 2026 will be conditional.”

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It's time to bill some people:

As the number of Canada’s refugee claimants hits new highs, a Conservative MP has revealed that Ottawa budgets about $224 per day to feed and house some foreigners who claim asylum after illegally entering the country.

Last week, Conservative MP Lianne Rood uploaded documents to social media showing the government’s answer to her question about what “goods and services” are provided to foreigners who have claimed asylum in Canada — but have not yet had their applications reviewed by immigration authorities.